‘Enverists’ and ‘Titoists’ - I

From article by Stephen Schwartz appearing in The Bosnian Institute :

"Fascinating and copiously documented historical survey of significant political and cultural trends in Albania and Kosova since before World War II, first published in The Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics (Glasgow) - second part (with footnotes) follows

Communism and Islam in Albania and Kosova, 1941-1999 - from the Partisan movement of the Second World War to the Kosova Liberation War"

[ ... ]

...Kosovar Albanians suffered various forms and degrees of discrimination under Yugoslav Communist and Serbian neo-Communist domination, culminating in decisions in 1987-90 by the regime of Slobodan Milošević to expel the Kosovar Albanians from the Yugoslav political, employment, education, and health systems. Kosovars were then compelled to organize a parallel economy and political life, independent schools, and improvised medical services. The aggravated oppression suffered by Albanians culminated in the Kosova liberation war of 1998-99, in which NATO intervened on their side, and the declaration of independence of the Kosova Republic in 2008.

Nevertheless, throughout the period of Serbian Communist suppression of the Kosovar Albanians, the latter were never effectively denied freedom of worship, or the right to pluralistic cultural expression diverging from a single Albanian literary standard and from 'socialist realism.' This was not the case in Hoxha's Albania. Hoxha declared Albania the world's first statutorily-atheist country in 1967, and all mosques, churches, Sufi centers, and the country's sole Jewish synagogue were seized as state property and assigned to such secular uses as cinema theaters and sports facilities. Religious functionaries were executed, including Muslim and Catholic clerics and Sufi shaykhs and babas (the title of Bektashi clergy). In addition, the Hoxha state forced extremely harsh restrictions on all cultural and educational activities, ruthlessly imposing a linguistic variant known as Unified Literary Albanian or letrare, attempting to extirpate the northern or Gheg variant of Albanian,[1] and forbidding and assailing artistic and literary modernism, which had been an important element in Albanian literature since the end of the first world war.

While in 1987-90 Kosovar Albanians under Milošević were fired from their jobs and prevented from schooling their children or obtaining health care in Yugoslav state institutions, the Communist and Serbian nationalist Yugoslavs, even then, as well as during the liberation war of 1998-99, did not impede Albanians from attending mosque or church services (except, during the war, where Serbs demolished mosques and Sufi structures) or writing and painting in whatever idiom or style they chose.

Indeed, Yugoslavia, as long as Tito was alive, asserted pride in its commitment to religious autonomy, linguistic and dialectal diversity, and aesthetic experimentation (although these claims were in some periods mendacious), and used these conceptions to promote its image as a 'democratic' socialist commonwealth. Under Hoxha, by contrast, everything except praise of the dictator, the Albanian Party of Labor (formerly the Communist Party of Albania), and nationalist Communism was banned. Under Tito, by contrast, nationalist 'propaganda' (which could take the form of items as innocuous on their face as folk balladry) was subject to sanctions, for Croats, Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Serbs, and Albanians. Exceptions to the Titoist suppression of nationalist aspirations obtained among Slovenes, whose patriotic traditions were considered unthreatening to Titoite Communism, and Macedonians, who were encouraged to develop a specific literary tradition as an alternative to the appeal among Macedonian Slavs of neighboring, Soviet-aligned Bulgaria. (The history of Bulgarian-Macedonian relations is irrelevant to the present inquiry.[2])

It would also be a conceptual error to equate 'Enverism' in Kosova with aggressive agitation for a single 'ethnic Albania' or 'Greater Albania' uniting Albania proper, Kosova, and the Albanian-speaking areas of western Macedonia, Montenegro, south Serbia, and northern Greece. As the Kosovar Albanian publicist Nexhmedin Spahiu wrote in 1999, while 'Enverists' were viewed as moderately sympathetic to Hoxha's regime, the essential cleavage separated 'Enverists,' who placed the Kosova issue within the general context of a broad national consciousness in a people partitioned between Albania proper and Kosova, and 'Titoists' who considered the Kosova problem to be distinct from the destiny of the broader Albanian community. In the period preceding the Kosova liberation war, Spahiu identified 'Enverism' with the noted essayist Rexhep Qosja (b. 1936) and 'Titoism' with the moderate and nonviolent national leader Ibrahim Rugova (1944-2006).[3] As will be explained, the KLA/UÇK, which triumphed in 1999, was neither 'Enverist' nor 'Titoist,' regardless of Western speculation about its supposed Marxist origins. Further, as I will seek to elucidate, in the aftermath of Communism's collapse in both Albania and Yugoslavia, as well as the success of UÇK, the terms 'Enverist' and 'Titoist' disappeared from the Kosovar political vocabulary. Although a nationalist left is present in Kosova today, its main protagonists do not identify with the legacy of either Communist Albania or of Yugoslavia.

1. The foundation of the Communist Movement in Albania and its antecedents

Albania was occupied by fascist Italy in 1939, its ruling King Zog (Ahmet Zogolli) fled, and Yugoslavia was subdued by Germany in April 1941. Kosova was soon occupied by the Italians and mainly attached to Albania, although the key mining area north of Mitrovica came under German control and was assigned, on the map, to Serbia, but as an Albanian autonomous zone. The German invasion of Russia on 22 June 1941 brought about a change in the line of the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (KPJ), which, while the Stalin-Hitler pact was in force, had concentrated its efforts on anti-British propaganda. Albania proper had not yet produced a Communist Party, and at its foundation, in the aftermath of Hitler's break with Stalin, Communism in the country was entirely 'Titoist.' This was because, lacking an industrial working class, Albania had no stable basis for Communist activity. At least 50 Albanians from Albania proper and Kosova, however, had participated in the Soviet-controlled International Brigades (IB) in Spain during the latter country's civil war of 1936-39. When an Albanian Communist Party was founded late in 1941, its inspiration, and even its guiding spirits, were Yugoslav; it was established in Tirana, the Albanian capital, by two Slav representatives of the Kosova section of the KPJ, Dušan Mugoša and Miladin Popović. Their mission was unambiguous: to recruit allies for the Yugoslav anti-fascist movement. Mugoša and Popović fashioned the new party out of three small groups that were little more than study circles.

Sadik Premte, an early and popular leader of the Albanian Communists, expressed suspicion of Popović, whom Premte described as 'a crafty Serb chauvinist who, under the mask of Communism, wanted to form a clique for the sake of better serving the interests of his country,' i.e. Yugoslavia. Premte, in turn, was accused by the Yugoslav Communist Vladimir Dedijer (1914-90) of 'Trotskyism' and being 'anti-Yugoslav.'[4] Premte and other pioneers of the Albanian Communist movement were soon expelled from the new party; Premte and a certain Anastas Lula were thrown out after a purge trial in Tirana in mid-1942. At least two Albanian dissenters from the official Communist line, Lula and Llazër Fundo (1899-1944)[5], were murdered during the war at the behest of Hoxha, a former Albanian student in France (where he may have been recruited to Communism by Fundo.) Hoxha was long suspected of serving as a monarchist police agent among the Albanians abroad, serving the regime of King Zog, but would become the Yugoslav-installed Communist chief of his native land.

According to Premte, many more such dissidents were assassinated. In memoirs, Hoxha referred to the purge of Lula and Premte as removal of an 'abscess,' and Albanian official party literature from Tirana continued to denounce them decades later. Premte escaped to France where he lived in exile from 1947 until his death in 1991; there he remained a target for assassination by Hoxha's agents, but joined the international Trotskyist movement. Premte survived to see the fall of the Tirana Communist regime, and was praised by the French Trotskyists as having 'remained faithful to the belief that there can be no socialism without democracy.'[6]

Llazër Fundo, although largely forgotten by Albanians today, was memorialized by British liaison officers assigned to the antifascist resistance movement in Albania, as well as Italian left-wing historians. Fundo was born in the town of Korça in Albania proper; his family were merchants from the nearby, once-prosperous city of Voskopoja (Moschopolis), which embodies a unique chapter in Balkan history. Voskopoja had been the economic center of Vlach (West Balkan Romanian) people and in the 18th century established one of the earliest printing industries in Christian languages in the Ottoman empire (Jewish printing under the Ottomans had begun earlier, in 1493, immediately after the expulsion of Jews from Spain and their invitation to settle in the Turkish lands, extended by the sultan.) Fundo was a Vlach. Voskopoja was largely depopulated at the end of the 18th century, and today is but a small village, yet is still famous for the beauty of the frescoes in its Orthodox churches...

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